Recipe below: Onion Torta with Pancetta and Thyme
I almost never use garlic in the winter. What I usually find I’m not crazy about—the softneck type, mass-produced in California and piled high in supermarkets. It almost always tastes acrid to me. I used to try to work with it, but I finally asked myself why. Now I say resist. A winter tomato sauce with just onion or shallot or leek is wonderful.
In April, field garlic will start popping up in my yard and around sidewalks and parking lots across much of the Northeast. On Long Island when I was a kid, we used to call this stuff onion grass, and I’d eat lots of it. I’d take a tin of anchovies, maybe a jar of pimento-stuffed cocktail olives, and a box of Triscuits and sit in my backyard, yanking up the little bulbs and fashioning a type of demented dollhouse antipasto. I felt so grown up. Nobody I knew thought to actually cook with field garlic back then. I do now, though. Both the chive-like tops and the little bulbs are gentle and delicious. Sort of a low-rent version of ramps.
But what I really wait for is the cultivated hardneck garlic that starts appearing at my Greenmarket, and in my own little garden, around June, when its immature shoots pop up looking like scallions, the bulbs not even formed into separate cloves yet. I pull up some of these adolescent garlics myself, but most of my homegrown I let rest underground until early August, when they’ll be fully developed, intense and sweet. The hardneck varieties, which have better flavor than softneck, don’t dry well. They need to be used either freshly dug or within two months. That’s why industrial garlic growers don’t grow them. Softnecks dry, and they keep through long, cold winters, although they do eventually grow those bitter green sprouts, and by that time they really start tasting crappy.
It’s still only mid-January, cold, gray, and brown in New York. It’ll be a while before I can experience garlic beautitude. So in the meantime I’ve decided to go full-on onion. I’ve always liked a slow braise of onion. French onion soup and pasta alla Genovese, both with lots of soft onion, are two of my favorite winter dishes. For this rustico onion torta I’ve used the Vidalia variety, because I thought its sweetness would work well with the chunk of pancetta I had on hand. A little lemon zest and a splash of dry white wine in the filling prevents the sweet onion from overpowering. I also included some of the thyme I rescued in December from my on-the-verge-of-freezing garden. Thyme and sweet onion are a gorgeous match.
Happy Winter cooking to you.
Onion Torta with Pancetta and Thyme
You’ll want a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom, preferably one with smooth, not fluted, sides, for a rustic look.
For the crust:
2 cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
5 thyme sprigs, the leaves chopped
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
⅓ cup dry white wine, or possibly a drizzle more
For the filling:
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 ½-inch-thick round of pancetta, cut into small dice
2 large Vidalia onions, thinly sliced
Salt
6 or 7 long thyme sprigs, the leaves chopped
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
Black pepper
The grated zest from 1 small lemon
A splash of white wine
1 extra large egg
½ cup heavy cream
To make the dough, put the flour into a big bowl. Add the salt, sugar, and thyme, and give it all a quick mix. Mix together the olive oil and the wine, and pour it over the flour. Mix everything around with a wooden spoon until you have a bowl of damp clumps. Squeeze a section of the dough together with your hand. It should stick together. If it seems dry, add a drizzle more of wine, and work that in. Dump the clumps out onto the counter, and squeeze them all together into a ball, giving it a few quick kneads with the palm of your hand. Flatten it out into a thick disk, and wrap it in plastic. Let it sit at room temperature for about an hour, so the dough can relax. If you want to make the dough the day before, it’ll be fine just sitting out overnight. I find that when I refrigerate olive oil dough, even if I let it come back to room temperature, the texture will be not as loose and harder to work with.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
To make the filling, get out a large sauté pan, and set it over medium heat. Drizzle in a little olive oil, and add the pancetta, letting it cook until it has given off much of its fat and its meat is crisp. Add the onion and a little salt. Sauté for about 5 minutes, letting the onion soften and get fragrant. Add the thyme, nutmeg, some black pepper, and the lemon zest, and continue cooking until the onion is very soft and is just starting to take on a little color, about 8 minutes longer. Give it a splash of wine, and let it bubble away. Turn off the heat, and let it cool down for about 10 minutes. Mix the egg with the cream, and give it a good stir. Add that to the onion mix, mixing it in well. Taste the filling for seasoning.
Roll the dough out into a large circle that’ll fit into your tart pan with about an inch of overhang. Drape it into the pan, and press it down. Pour in the filling, and smooth it out. Trim off and discard most of the dough overhang. Pinch the rim of the tart to raise it a little, crimping it all around. Give the top of the tart a drizzle of fresh olive oil, and bake it until its crust is lightly browned and its filling is set and golden, about 30 to 35 minutes. Let it sit for about a half hour before slicing.